چکیده انگلیسی

In today's highly competitive global economy, the demand for high-quality products manufactured at low costs with shorter cycle times has forced a number of manufacturing industries to consider various new product design, manufacturing, and management strategies. Recently, due to the rapid advances in Information Technology (IT), new paradigms have successively emerged such as CIM, JIT, lean manufacturing, concurrent engineering, business process engineering and more enterprise engineering (EE). Enterprise modeling is currently in use either as a technique to represent and understand the structure and behavior of the enterprise, or as a technique to analyze business processes, and in many cases as support technique for business process reengineering. However, architectures and methods for EE have also to cover the integration of quality, information system, cost, human and organizational aspects and have to support the EE process from goal and requirements definition up to implementation and operation (Vernadat, 1999. Proceedings of CARS&FOF 99 Conference, Aquas de Lindoia, Brazil).
This paper provides an overview of architectures, methods and tools for EE. It then points out substantial results achieved so far as well as presents a methodology and a related tool in more detail, which supports all phases and aspects of EE.

نتیجه گیری انگلیسی

The task of the project was to analyze and model the entire corporate order handling. We deliberately avoided studying and modeling individual, delimited sections or departments. The task of realigning the process structures along the business processes required us, due to the complex interactions between business processes, corporate data, systems environment and organization, to describe these aspects in one model. For this purpose, we employed the method that has been described above and the tool MO2GO. At first, we combined the relevant products, orders and resources of the company into classes and described these with characteristic features (Spur et al., 1996).
We studied the following object classes:
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the orders ‘customer inquiry and customer order for standard, engineering and systems analysis machines’,
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the products ‘entire machine, assembly and single part’, and
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the executing resources ‘organizational units or departments’.
Considering this, the relevant business processes and their control as well as the resources that are necessary to execute these processes were described. In the course of the project, the model was either detailed hierarchically or modified to describe and discuss improvement measures. Supported by the tool MO2GO, the processes, beginning with the inquiry of a customer and ending with the start of the machine, were analyzed. The core of the model consisted of the description of the logical processing sequence of the tasks to accept, schedule and trace the customer order and of the customized construction and assembly of the machines. Supplementary to the process descriptions, we also analyzed and modeled the times to execute the tasks as well as their variances.
The effective development of the model was guaranteed by mechanisms for consistency checks, navigation and model modifications. Application-oriented, predefined class structures and partial models as well as sample models that were supplied in libraries supported the development and the reusability of models.
Fig. 3 illustrates a section of the developed process model along with a relevant diagram depicting the time and cost evaluation.With regard to customer-oriented order handling the analyses enabled us to identify improvement potentials in the following areas:
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extravagant order scheduling processes, i.e. from the order intake to the order load-in into the PPC system,
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non-participation of the marketing department when preparing an offer,
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delayed entry of customer orders,
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inaccurate schedules of the planned order handling,
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vague procurement cycles for supplied parts and components,
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delayed order release due to unrealistic release dates,
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failures to meet deadlines of special constructions, for example due to unrealistic time allowances or unfavorable order priorities.
The figure illustrates exemplary time and cost potentials. The processes ‘appliance design and appliance construction’, that are separated in the actual state, determine with a processing time of nine weeks the entire throughput time considerably. The processing time of these processes amounts to 58% of the entire throughput time. This leads to customer dissatisfaction as well as substantial cost increases. The employment of an appliance construction set and the integration of these processes into the entire production process reduces the throughput time in this area by 50%. The higher investment costs for the construction set already pay off after ten completed production units.
Further measures to optimize the process included for example:
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task integration of disposition and procurement,
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development of an order control station with people responsible for product groups beginning with planning and ending with the delivery,
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assignment of construction modification tasks to staff members of the respective development team,
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the vague replacement times for parts and subassemblies in the PPC system were examined and updated,
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orders are released immediately without considering procurement times and release dates.
The measures were documented in a target model and were discussed in the relevant departments with the people concerned.
Along the way, the tool MO2GO enabled us to create graphic and text-based documents as a basis for the discussion. The documents contain structured directories of all modeled business processes and corporate objects. To develop the target model:
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redundant and unnecessary processes were eliminated,
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needed tasks were summarized within the meaning of functional integration,
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new resources were assigned if process responsibilities changed and
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processes were concatenated and parallelized with regard to customer orientation.
These measures effected a considerable reduction of throughput times (by ca. 33%) and costs; departmental egotisms were reduced and the orientation of staff members towards the use for the customer was intensified. Furthermore, the QM documents that are necessary for certification were automatically generated from the process models. The quality assurance system is now certified.
In the second example, IPK created a computer-aided QM manual according to DIN ISO 9000. This manual was based on the product and process model ‘meat chain/slaughter and carve operation’, automated by IPK's modeling tool MO2GO, and maintained and regularly updated by the meat company. The original QM manual had traditionally been created by word processing tools. Therefore, it was neither transparent, nor was it easy to examine the consistency. The tool MO2GO was then used to convert the existing QM manual into a computer-aided enterprise model and QM manual.
This approach reduced the job instructions and procedural rules by more than 50%. It also led to a clear focus on the value-adding processes. The quality and reality of the descriptions were clearly improved. The QM manual is updated and maintained automatically by the model. At the same time, the model was used to realign the corporate processes and controlling, and to introduce an environment management system.